A note on Cormac's Pictish brooch

A tenth-century Irish glossary attributes a word for 'brooch' to the 'Pictish language'. The word also occurs in an eighth-century Irish law text, and the glossator's form has been compared with a hapax legomenon word in an Old Welsh poem. This note discusses the possible etymological relations between these words, and pursues the wider implications of the linguistic analysis so constructed.